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GLOBAL CHANGE AWARD

Last week in Stockholm has been taken place The Global Change Award held by the HM foundation that aims to help and make happen projects for a circular and sustainable fashion. The 1 million grant is shared between the most innovative projects, who can also get access to a one-year innovation accelerator provided by H&M Foundation, Accenture and KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. The idea of circularity is the core of the award and it means more than ‘recycling’, it aims to find ideas that can avoid waste in the material, design and production of garments.

Here are the 5 winners of this year:

– DENIM DYED DENIM: dyeing denim involves a great waste of energy and water, this project wants to reuse old denim, broken into small fragments, that can be used as pigment for new denim.

– CONTENT THREAD: Facilitating sorting and recycling of clothes using a digital thread. In order to be better at recycling clothes we need to know the exact component of each garment, so this projects aims to insert an RFID tag with all the “ingredients” and information regarding every specific piece of clothes, so it can be traced and recycled properly.

– MANURE COUTURE: “This prestigious grant will help to convince decision makers about the advantages of waste, cow manure, and show them that it is a valuable resource to create new environmentally friendly materials such as clothing. The grant also allows us to improve our method so we can produce quality clothes made from cow manure on a larger scale. Always respecting animal welfare.”

– SOLAR TEXTILE: This is a conceptual idea for a production of nylon fabric that only uses water, plant waste and solar energy. It also binds greenhouse gases into fashion fabrics, instead of releasing them into the air, contributing towards a zero-emissions world. If successful, the material would be identical to the existing nylon, but created from renewable resources and in a sustainable way.

– GRAPE LEATHER: This is our favorite project, and the one that made us aware of this award itself, and actually the one with the greates prize!

Creating traditional leather, is harmful for animals and the process involves the use of chemicals, this innovation only uses waste from wine production such as grape skin to produce a new enviromental friendly and cruelty free leather, and we know in Italy there’s an aboundance of this kind of waste! GREAT JOB!